Friday, February 18, 2011

23 MORE Oddities and Strange Creatures from Film Land!

Well, I promised you more oddities and I’m delivering more oddities! Here’s a fresh new batch of Hollyweirds craziest creatures and monsters! I’m actually thinking of making this a regular thing here at The Film Connoisseur since you guys have reacted so well to these articles. Here's a link to the article that went before this one, it was called 23 of the Oddest and Strangest Monsters from Film Land, and heres a link to the article that goes after this one: 24 of the Oddest and Stranges Monsters from Film Land (Part 3). So be on the look out for more of these in the future. There’s such a vast amount of film monsters out there, I could probably do these kinds of articles forever! Okay, I’ve babbled long enough, you guys came here to see some monsters, so here you go! Enjoy!

Film: From Dusk Till Dawn (1994)

Creature: Vampire vixen with mouth in stomach

Description: Yup, that’s right boys and girls, this vampire chick has a mouth right on her stomach! One scene has her biting some poor bikers clean off with it. I guess this way, whoever she eats is processed faster! Kind of like a shortcut for a quicker digestion. This creature had a bigger part in the film, but it was cut out and considered to gross for theaters. You guys can catch a better glimpse of this beasty on the deleted scenes for this film. The filmmakers were kind enough to include a whole bunch of deleted coolness on this films dvd release.

Film: Dagon (2001)

Creature: Cambarro

Description: Imagine you went on vacations to Spain, ended up getting shipwrecked in some spooky town filled with half fish/half human people who worship an underwater creature called Dagon and that in the end, you discovered that the creature pictured above was your father! That’s exactly what happens to the main character of this film! Bummer huh?

Film: The Dark Crystal (1982)

Creature: The Land Striders

Description: These creatures look like mutated bunny rabbits that escaped out of a Salvador Dahli painting! They have these super long legs that allow them to gallop pretty fast, almost like a horse, but with bunny face and bunny ears! At one point in the movie, the two main characters Jen and Kira (two ‘Gelflings’) find these creatures and make a speedy ride to the bad guys castle. The movie is filled with many interesting and odd creatures, these land striders are only the tip of the ice berg in a film filled with weird creature after weird creature.

Film: Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)

Creature: Predalien

Description: Cant believe I’m actually writing something about this movie since I hated it with every fiber of my being, but whatever, the oddity that is The Predalien is why Im mentioning this film. The idea of mixing both Aliens and Predators in one single creature was a nifty one, I have to admit. The creature has the benefits of both creatures. If only they had developed the story in some other way instead of small town U.S.A., things could have turned out a bit better.

Film: Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

Creature: Freddy Baby

Description: This hideous looking abomination (that’s what they call it when it’s born!) is Freddy Krueger minutes after he emerged from his mothers womb. As you can see, the bastard son of a thousand maniacs was always a sorry looking bastard. Weird thing about this little monster is that as soon as it’s born it escapes from the nurses arms, falls to the floor and crawls away. Minutes later, he is reborn into full grown adult Freddy.

Weakness: The souls of the victims that are trapped inside of him.

Film: Eraserhead (1977)

Creature: Premature Baby (or is it?)

Description: This ghastly thing you see pictured above is the son of Henry Spencer and his girlfriend Mary X. They weren’t planning on having a kid, but you know how these things go. She was a one night stand, a crazy night of passion. Nine months later, whamo!, your changing diapers. Problem is that Henry and Mary’s baby was born way to prematurely, the doctors don’t even know if its human! But they take it in, after all, she did give birth to it. This is one ugly thing, it makes the ugliest sounds when it breaths, it is obviously sick and dying… and it never stops crying. It becomes a real hindrance in Henry’s life. Especially when Mary decides to jump ship and leaves him alone with the creature. Wanna freak your friends out? Show them this movie!

Weakness: Open its bandages, and it will fall apart and choke on its own vomit, literally.

Film: The Funhouse (1981)

Creature: Gunther Straker

Description: If you know Tobe Hooper, then you know he loves his disfuntional families. Funhouse is no exception. This one is all about a family that lives in a carnival. The son, Gunther, is hideously deformed, but he has found work playing the Frankenstein Munster on the haunted house ride. Good thing he wears a mask, if people were to see his true face, they’d never get on that ride! He is a disgruntled and sexually unsatisfied individual which prompts him to kill a group of horny teenagers who decide to stay the night inside of The Funhouse. Big Mistake!

Film: The Toxic Avenger (1984)

Creature: Lloyd Kaufman, Michael Herz

Description: The Toxic Avenger was actually a regular human being once upon a time. His name was Melvin, and he was the laughing stock of the local bullies at the Tromaville Health Club. You see, Melvin was a janitor at the local gym. That is, until he accidently ends up in a vat of toxic chemicals! Then, the chemicals transform Melvin into the super powered Toxic Avenger! Suddenly, he is the superhero of Tromaville! He looks like the incredible melting man…all the time! His weapon of choice? His trusty mop! Favorite move against criminals? Ripping their arms off and beating them to death with them.

Film: Evil Dead 2 (1987)

Creature: Rotten Apple Head Demon

Description: When Ashley J. Williams otherwise known as ‘Ash’ goes on vacation with his girlfriend to a cabin in the woods, he finds a Professors mysterious tape recorder. When he plays the recording on the machine, he finds that it’s the professor, reciting demon resurrection passages from ‘The Book of the Dead’. It isn’t long before all manner of demons are attacking Ash and his girlfriend. By the end of the film, Ash confronts the biggest demon of the all! Rotten Apple Head is the name that the cast and crew gave to the demon, because as you can see in the pic, that’s what it looks like. Also, this demon is made up of all the people who died through out the film!

Weakness: A Chainsaw to the eye will do the trick. Also opening up a dimensional portal that could suck this creature back in time will work just fine, just make sure you say the right words. Every single little syllable of them.

Film: Nightbreed (1990)

Creature: The whole freaking cast!

Description: I tried choosing only one creature from Nightbreed, but this wasn’t an easy task considering how practically every other character in the film is some sort of freakazoid. Many of the creatures on this flick defy description, so I don’t even know where to begin with some of these characters. One guy ripped his face off, one guy has twin snakes that come out of his stomach, one is a humanoid porcupine creature. The oddness never stops in this movie!

Film: Basket Case 2 (1990)

Creature: The whole freaking cast!

Description: I know I put the Basket Case trilogy on the previous list, but I had to make special mention of Basket Case 2 because it’s the film that introduces us to a whole community of freaks. You see on this film Duane and Belial are taken and placed under the protection of Granny Ruth, a woman who runs a mansion which serves as a haven for freaks of all shapes and sizes. It’s in this mansion that Belial and Duane realize that they are not alone in their freakishness. And they both get some action, if you know what I mean!

Film: Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977)

Creature: Thrash Monster a.k.a. 'Dianoga'

Description: This oddity lives within the confines of the Empires thrash compactor. It lives off of the crap that Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine and their storm troopers throw away. When Luke Skywalker and the rest of the crew end up trapped inside of this thrash compactor, the strange creature you see pictured above emerges from the murky waters. Apparently it has only one eye, but who knows what the rest of it looks like? The answer lies beneath the dark waters it resides in. A scary thought in deed!

Film: Freaked (1993)

Creature: The whole freaking cast!

Description: Yet another film that is entirely filled with freaks! This film is about Ricky Coogan, a former child star who is hired by a company to be the spokesperson for their new toxic fertilizer Zygrot 24. Ricky says sure he’ll do it, because their paying 5 million buckaroos! Zygrot 24 is a dangerous toxic chemical with serious side effects. It turns whoever comes in contact with it into hideous mutant freaks! In an interesting turn of events, Ricky himself ends up getting transformed into a freak himself! Half man, half monster! We got all manner of creatures on this flick, from a half dog half human (played by Keanu Reeves!) to a half man half worm…we got a frogman, a mancow, a man worm….you name it and it’s on this movie! This film benefits from having the extremely creative Screaming Mad George and one of the Chiodo brothers in its production staff!

Film: Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Creature: The Pale Man

Description: This terrifying creature has no eyes on its face. Instead, it has its eyes on its hands! Its skin sags, as if it used to be a fat, but lost a lot of weight. Now it looks like a skeleton with too much skin on it. It loves to gorge on food, but ultimately, its favorite dish is live fairies! It loves to rip their heads off with his teeth! It also enjoys scaring the living hell out of little girls.

Film: Hellboy II (2008)

Creature: Angel of Death

Description: It seems Guillermo del Toro loves creatures with no eyes on their faces. The Angel of Death in Hellboy II: The Golden Army has no eyes on its face, instead, its eyes are spread out across the tips of its black wings. If that doesn’t make the creature strange enough, this Angel of Death tells Hellboy that he is going to doom humanity if he lives! And that Liz (Hellboy’s Girl) will suffer most for it. Bummer!

Film: Mars Attacks (1996)

Creature: Martian Invaders

Description: These slimy green creatures have delusions of grandeur. They are here to destroy the human race and conquer our planet! They are green skinned, have exposed brains and look like walking skeletons. They have an armada of spaceships with which they invade our planet and destroy important landmarks. Their weapon of choice is a laser gun that can disintegrate anyone they zap with it. These creatures enjoy taking humans hostage and performing sick experiments on them, like for example, Sarah Jessica Parker gets her head stuck to the body of her Chihuahua, effectively turning her into a bitch. The Martian invaders are very tricky in nature, they make you think they are coming in peace. The next thing you know, they are zapping everyone away with their laser guns! They also seem to like Playboy magazine, but that goes for humans as well.

Film: The Brain (1988)

Creature: Alien Brain

Description: This film is about a giant brain from outer space that is trying to take over the world by controlling peoples minds. This giant alien brain uses his mind control powers through television. You see, it uses a self-help talk show called “Independent Thinking” to get to the masses! The thing looks like one gigantic brain with eyes, the visual is quite cool. This movie is bloodless, very cheap, yet very entertaining in a “so bad its good” kind of way. Great for a laugh with your friends, sadly, it suffers the same fate of Terrorvision (1986): its not available on DVD yet!

Film: Dead Heat (1988)

Creature: Biker Zombie with Three Faces

Description: This is one weird movie. Two Lethal Weapon wannabe cops are investigating a rash of crimes that have been occurring in the city. Essentially, criminals come in, take whatever they want and runway. Apparently these criminals are also impervious to bullets! That’s right, it seems like these criminals cant die! What makes them so damn tough? The two cops soon discover that the criminals are actually zombies! And that somebody is conducting experiments in the resurrection of the dead! When the cops get their noses too close to the bad guys plans, they release this unholy monstrosity upon them! The three faced biker zombie!

Film: Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

Creature: Klownzilla

Description: Klownzilla is the king of the Killer Klowns from Outerspace. When the good guys venture inside of the Killer Klowns spaceship, the stumble upon this gigantic beast! It picks up their Ice Cream truck and hurls it across the floor! It picks up the good guys with its huge hands as if it were King Kong! A nefarious threat to the good guys!

Weakness: Don’t blow up its gigantic red clown nose! It obliterates him for good!

Film: Troll (1986)

Creature: Troll

Description: A little girl named Wendy Anne Potter finds a magical ring, and without thinking twice about it puts it on. A couple of seconds later, she becomes possessed by an evil Troll looking to take over earth! Now the Troll can hide in Wendy’s body and transform back into the troll whenever it wants! His purpose? To transform everyone in the building complex into little trolls and goblins, but his ultimate goal is really to make his magical kingdom take over earth.

Film: Dead Alive (1992)

Creature: Nigel’s Mum

Description: This is a real ugly beasty in deed! Nigel’s mum gets infected by a deadly virus, when a Sumerian Rat Monkey bites her in the arm on a leisure visit to the zoo. Its not long before she dies and returns as a zombie! Nigel buries her, but she just wont stay dead! This character goes through many transformations through out the film, her final transformation is into this huge monstrous creature which proceeds to open up a huge mouth in her stomach and eat Nigel with it!

Film: Beetlejuice (1989)

Creature: Beetlejuice Snake

Description: Beetlejuice is the ghost with the most. But, he is trapped in the afterlife. In order to escape momentarily to wreck some havoc, somebody has to say his name three times! Enter the Maitland’s, a recently deceased couple who still wants to live in the house they had when they were alive; problem is that the Deetz’s have just bought their home. And they are a really weird family! So, the Maitlands, in a move of desperation call upon Bettlejuice to help them exorcise the humans from their home. In one of these attempts to scare the Deetz’s out of the house, Bettlejuice turns into the snake you see pictured above. When the Deetz’s see this ghastly apparition, the snake says “We want your daughter Chuck!”

Film: Laserblast (1978)

Creature: Turtle Aliens

Description: These stupid creatures look like turtles without their shells. On one of their expeditions to earth, they leave a powerful weapon stranded in the dessert. The weapon has the power to blow shit up real damn good! Problem is that whoever finds it and uses it slowly mutates into a zombie creature with a happy trigger finger. Enter Billy, an angst ridden teenager who finds the weapon and proceeds to make ashes out of anybody who ever messed with him. Half way through the galaxy, the turtle aliens are reprimanded by their turtle leader and sent back to earth to retrieve the weapon and any evidence of its existence. Had they been more careful with their gear, they wouldn’t be in this mess.

Nice one, Fran! If you were to include monsters from Japan, you could definitely go on forever.

NIGHTBREED is awesome. I saw it in the theater. It makes little sense but all the creatures make it worth watching. HOpefully, the recently uncovered directors cut will be in suitable enough shape to be put back in the film. It was like an hours worth of footage, I think.

@Venom: Yeah, I was researching monsters for these blog posts and came upon so many cool ones from Japan....I will do an international version soon! Godzilla and Mothra will no doubt end up on the list.

Nightbreed was such a troubled shoot. I dont get how a studio can greenlight a film, and then after its filmed take it and cut it up until it makes no sense whatsoever. Thats what they did with Nightbreed. The studio found it to be "too weird" so they cut lots of stuff out, and then marketed the film as if it was a slasher!

I hope that a directors cut emerges on dvd or blueray one of these days, that would be awesome!

The baby from Eraserhead is another excellent choice! I loved all of the creatures from Dagon, but I have never liked The Funhouse or Gunther, I just dont see what the point of him was, and thought the make-up was just odd looking rather than terrifying.

Great selections. That Funhouse dude was from my heyday. It's so funny how you can identify with films, but Funhouse, The Thing, Fort Apache The Bronx, The Warriors, Prophecy [there's a creature for ya] were all really big for me. Great choice!

Love the trashmonster. The Beetlejuice snake was really freaky. Nice memory on that one.

@Carl: Thing about the creature from Funhouse is that it comes from Tobe Hooper, many of his previous films are about a sexually unsatasfied son, who lives in a very disfuntional family, just check out the first two Texas Chainsaw Movies, espeecially the second one where Bubba uses the chainsaw as an extension of himself, threatening women with it as if it was his dick.

Hooper adresses a similar character, whos family situation is messed up, his parents are the worst parents anyone could hope for, so when he sees kids having a "normal" life, he hates them, and he syphons his hatred towards them by killing them. Killing is the one thing the creature feels it can control. At least thats how I saw him.

Speaking of the make up effects on The Funhouse, it was one of make up effects genius Rick Baker's creations, apparently he was working under an extremely low budget, still the creature is interesting to me and Hooper keeps the beastly thing under shadows most of the time.

@The Sci-Fi Fanatic: Thanks man! I tried finding the freakiest creatures I could, I forgot to post a link to the article that went before this one, but Ill see if I can add it to this article. Glad you enjoyed the choices, and yeah that bear creature thing from The Prophecy was another good one. I'll work up another article soon, I love finding these weird creatures from the past.

Hey JD, Im going to be re-watching Freaked soon so, I'll be reviewing it in the next couple of days. Havent seen it since it was first released way back in the 90s. I do remember loving the make up effects and all the crazy creatures.

Alex Winters directed this one himself, and Im really curious about that THE GATE remake he's been working on for some time now, I've seen some production sketches and some interviews where he talks about the film, but I've yet to see any actualy pics or footage of it. I hope it doesnt end up staying in development hell. I'm really curious to see what he will do with it, he also mentions that it will be in 3d...lets see if that one ever makes it to theaters.

Dead Heat is another film i forgot about. Hell I convinced myself it was never made or I never saw it. I only know one person to see it besdies me and that was the kid I rented it with about 1,000 years ago.

Enjoy your trip down memory lane Ian! Actually, that movie had quite a few strange monsters in it, I'll see if I can mention them on a future Monster Blog Post. I remember loving that huge chunk of beef that is re-animated! Freaky!

I must say, the humanesque alien in Alien Resurrection is a great addition to this list! Fantastic list nevertheless. Especially since you mentioned night breed! The giant old nasty bat at the end of Dead Alive was impressive, but I think that might have been the grandmother as you mentioned. Also, the nasty demon in The Gate! Multiple faces on the body... Awesome!